Fed Minutes Spook The Market The Fed Minutes caused stocks to fall on Wednesday which is unusual because normally the market ignores the Minutes. Minutes are usually elongated policy discussions that get wonkish. They are a month old, so they don’t often bring anything new to the table. However, in
Horses Carry The Market To A Record High On Tuesday the stock market reached a record high in very unconvincing fashion. Large cap tech stocks drove it up, while most stocks actually fell. S P 500 had 161 net decliners which means 161 more stocks fell than rose. The stock market has had 12 days this
Retail Sales Growth Improves Again The number one story in macro is the impact of the decline in unemployment benefits now that we know the benefits will go out slowly, many people won’t get them, and even the people who do get them are getting less money than they got in July. We already know
Tesla Is On A Rampage Monday was all about Tesla. There was an article on Tech Crunch that was titled “Tesla Shares Rally For No Reason.” This is a big deal because Tech Crunch isn’t a stock website. Tesla shares were up 11.2% on Monday for no reason like the article said. To be clear,
Delinquencies Fall Sharply This was a unique recession because many who are poor and middle class actually made more money from unemployment insurance than they would normally earn from their jobs. As you can see from the chart below, 1.4% of American Express’ loans are 30 days past due. That’s down
No Record High Friday A record high seemed to have been all but assured this week, yet it didn’t happen. Considering how much stocks rallied on Wednesday, there is obviously resistance at the February 19th high. It’s not a coincidence that the S P 500 rallied sharply on Wednesday, but stopped right
V Shaped Recovery In Retail Sales It was wrong to be so negative on July’s economic data. Even though headline retail sales growth missed estimates, it was a pretty good report. We're still calling for a cyclical recovery. If August’s data is better than July’s it will be really good. We already saw
No Record High On Thursday: Small Cap Value Underperforms The stock market delayed a new record high one day by falling on Thursday, but the hottest stocks continued to win. It appears small cap value’s outperformance streak ended at 3 days. This streak went from last Friday to this Tuesday. Every t
Strong Jobless Claims Prediction for a strong labor market in August looks good as the jobless claims report from the week of August 8th showed a lot of improvement. BLS report’s survey week is next week’s jobless claims report. As long as it shows more improvement, we could end up with better job c
Huge Wednesday Rally Some investors thought the sharp reversal on Tuesday afternoon was a key signal. That was a mistake as the market had a huge rally on Wednesday for seemingly no reason. S P 500 was up 1.4%, the Nasdaq was up 2.13%, and the Russell 2000 was up 0.52%. Mega cap growth stocks destro
